It is a manly sounding name for an exercise, Determined Promise. It implies a vow of great solemnity and is intended, I think, to promote public confidence. It is another in the series of exercises designed to stress and test the ability of a local government to respond to and ameliorate the effects of a […]

I cranked up the Fujitsu as we cleared Flight Level 29 and headed for crusing altitude at 33 thousand feet. The airline had promised us the movie Chicago- a feature article is prominent in the in-flight magazine, too, some sort of product placement cross-promotion- did not seem to want to play on the tape machine. […]

Last week, in 1881, the Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops. He had been off the reservation, on the run for five years. Since the great victory on the Little Big Horn on the 25th of June, 1876. You will remember the Last Stand, though it didn’t happen that way, when the serenely […]

It’s the Ides of July, halfway through this month and a long ways to someplace else. I turned on the radio, up late and getting Vicki Barker of the World Service in mid-broadcast. Nobody was murdered in Iraq last night, at least no one of consequence. But she told me this morning that the troops […]

‘Easy reading is damned hard writing.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne Not that what I write is easy to read. I will leave that to the old dead white guys of the pantheon. It is the Fourth of July. It is a magic day in this slow-starting summer season. This feels more like Memorial Day than the […]

It is drizzly in town this morning, which is the way we could sum up the spring. It is not cool, but it is definitely not hot. This is almost the Fourth of July and we have had exactly two days that got into the nineties. Tom Cruise is 42 and Dave Barry is denying […]

It is gray here as the moisture from Tropical Depression Bill sweeps over the southeast corner of the United States. The folks on the radio are predicting an eighty percent chance of rain. I don’t want to go to work today. The Boss is back and the madness will begin all over again down at […]

Tropical Storm Bill, the second-named storm of the young season, waded ashore down in Louisiana yesterday. We got hourly updates on the progress of the storm surge on our Blackberry PDAs just in case we had to deploy the resources of the Department in response. Although I think that mission belongs to some other Department […]

I woke this morning from the running dream. You may know it. It is the one where a sea of adversaries of fantastic shape, both known and unknown oppose you and you flail at them, sometimes landing a good one but it doesn’t matter. The motion continues and the scenes roll on and at some […]